Quotes About Speech

Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can't go where the heart can, not completely. It's freeing, to think there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so—and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.

So often, within the privacy of our inner worlds, we take the difficult thing and make it worse. Our own subliminal hate speech coats our experience and gives an added layer of meaning to things that are already difficult enough.

It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.

That's writing, huh. What does it do?" "It's like talking, but it makes no sound.

With Trump, I always knew that it wasn't my intelligence per se that was being insulted by the transparent distortions that burbled from his lips; that was just the way the man talked.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

A woman's weapon is her tongue.

Men who think much want to speak often

He was not witty, nor did he deal in anecdotes.

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

A crucial speech stressed the active tyranny of Catholicism: if the new Bill was passed, the result would be the creation of a Catholic state in Ireland hostile to Protestantism. This speech was regularly reprinted as a body blow to the hopes of Catholic Emancipation.

On 18 January, determined to repair fences, Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons to emphasize that 'the United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses . . . Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.

Wise men speak when they have something to say, fools speak because they have to say something

It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

The orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. But this confidence must be due to the speech itself, not to any preconceived idea of the speaker's character;

For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation.

A vowel is that which without impact of tongue or lip has an audible sound.

Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, ie, the sort of thing they seek or avoid, where that is not obvious— hence there is no room for character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject.

I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.